Wise Bread’s Top 100 Chart Just Got Better

We started the Top 100 Personal Finance Blogs chart because we love discovering and recognizing talented bloggers. You helped us build this chart, with hundreds of emails and tweets suggesting new blogs, correcting errors, and offering your encouragement.

Today the chart has snowballed into a database of over 650 blogs, with more being added every day! To keep it useful for our readers, we’ve added several new features.

Introducing the New WiseScore

The blogs are now ranked by WiseScore—a comprehensive composite score that takes into account four key factors:

Traffic: Using Compete and Alexa stats.

Authority: Measured by how often other credible sites link to the blog, using Yahoo Inbound Links and Google Page Rank.

Social media influence: Using number of Twitter followers and Klout' social influence score.

Readers' loyalty: Using number of RSS subscribers provided by Feedburner.

Each factor makes up 25% of the final WiseScore. Of course like the old chart, you can still sort the list by any individual statistic by clicking on the top of each column. If you have any additional questions, check out our FAQ page.

Blogger Profile

You can find lots of interesting information about each blogger by visiting their blog’s profile.

Dig into each of the seven stats that makes up the WiseScore, and see how the blog compares to the rest of PF sphere.

Most recent and most linked-to content: This is great for finding most popular articles for any given blog.

Demographics: Check out who else is reading your favorite blog.

Traffic drill down: Get the specific unique visitors and pageview data. See if a blog's traffic is trending up or down.

Latest tweets by and about the blogger and Klout score: Is your favorite blogger an influencer or a follower on Twitter? What are people saying about her?

Help Us Make it Better!

We are releasing a lot of features in the near future, including badges, achievement scores, readers ratings, private forums, extended profiles, and a contact system to connect bloggers with journalists, publicists, and advertisers.

That's a lot of new features at once, Will! Great job. One suggestion I'd like to make is that you reduce your dependency on PageRank. The last time it was confirmed updated was somewhere around April! Not sure how that can accurately determine authority. I could have stopped blogging altogether in June and still have more authority than some people if you use pagerank. Maybe toss in MozRank to help even the field? At least MozRank is updated rather regularly.

Also, you're giving a lot of weight to Feedburner subscribers when not everyone uses Feedburner. I agree that you need a metric like that included, but just doesn't seem fair to lump some people into using it if they don't want to. (for the record, I do, but I know some don't)

Thank you for your kind words BB. These are fantastic suggestions. We have been looking into MozRank as a way to supplement PageRank. Internally we rely on many of SEOMOZ's tools for our own SEO projects. We're definitely evaluating this feature for future releases.

That's a good point about Feedburner as well. We are also looking for additional ways to supplement Feedburner stats. One thing to keep in mind is that some people who are missing Feedburner stats actually DO use Feedburner, but they just have to activate their Awareness API.

Hey Will; You do an amazing job. I have been writing $uper $aver since 1980. When I transitioned from primarily hard copy into a blog format last year I made it my goal to move up in the Wise Bread rankings. This is still my goal. Thank you for a format that even the technologically challenged can understand and appreciate! -- Jan Leasure, $uper $aver